Theater: Dour Delight

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3 Bags Full, by Jerome Chodorov. Seme actors need funny lines to be funny. Paul Ford needs only Paul Ford. His face is in perpetual mourning; he can bat out a laugh by not batting an eye. His body is always on the point of settling, like a house. His mind works like a stopped clock, and the time is half-past McKinley. Indeed, part of what makes him so phenomenally droll is the sense that three or four entire generations have passed him by and left his features mottled in nonplused fury.

This French-bred farce is set in 1905, and Ford has no trouble convincing anyone that the swiftest road to hell is to read the early plays of George Bernard Shaw. That is what his daughter is doing, and she has already fallen in love with a chauffeur. Depravity surrounds Ford. The clerk of his sporting-goods concern has lifted half a million dollars from the firm, and makes a scoundrelly proposition. He will abscond with the loot unless Ford gives him his daughter's hand and a general managership. The swag is in two matching bags. When a third identical bag containing the downstairs maid's lingerie is shuffled on to the scene, the plot boils over in mistaken identities and furious bag snatching and switching.

The dialogue is archly mock-Edwardian; the pace, trampolin-bouncy. The sprung rhythms prove complementary, and the cast handle the outlandish fool ery like seasoned farceurs. The show does have its slack and silly moments, but never when Paul Ford is dead center, deadpan and dead earnest, the dourest living master of comic mayhem.